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Ramseys Step Into Spotlight With Book and TV Interviews

After three years of virtual seclusion, John and Patsy Ramsey have emerged to argue strenuously that they played no role in the killing of their 6-year-old daughter, JonBenet.

After the release on Friday of their book, ''The Death of Innocence'' (Thomas Nelson), the Ramseys are scheduled to appear in a taped interview on Friday night on ABC's ''20/ 20'' and every day next week on NBC's ''Today'' show. In the television appearances, the Ramseys deny accusations, as they have to investigators, that they killed their daughter and insist that the murderer is still at large, according to transcripts of the interviews.

The television appearances and book release coincide with public statements by Lou Smit, a Colorado Springs detective working for the Ramseys, who has granted several interviews recently in which he restated his belief that an intruder, not the Ramseys, was responsible for JonBenet's death.

While police in Boulder have discounted Mr. Smit's theory and say they are still investigating the killing, the timing of the interviews around the release of the book has suggested to some people, including Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, that the Ramseys are waging a public relations campaign to deflect attention from themselves as suspects.

In fact, JonBenet's parents remain the only named suspects in a case that has baffled investigators since Mr. Ramsey found his daughter's body in the basement of their Boulder home on Dec. 26, 1996. After dismissing a grand jury that had failed to indict anyone after 13 months of reviewing evidence, Alex Hunter, the Boulder County district attorney, said last fall that the Ramseys remained under the ''umbrella of suspicion.'' That has not changed.

Efforts to reach the Ramseys, who now live in Atlanta, were unsuccessful. Telephone messages left with their lawyers, L. Lin Wood in Atlanta and Hal Haddon in Denver, brought no replies. Nor did Mr. Smit's lawyer, Greg Walta, return a call.

In an interview today, Mr. Hunter declined to speculate why the Ramseys had suddenly become so visible on television.

''I think the book, ABC, all this stuff speaks for itself,'' he said, ''and I'd rather not say more than that.''

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Mr. Owens has been a harsh critic of the Ramseys for some time. Two weeks after the grand jury was dismissed, he chastised the couple for hiding behind lawyers and advisers and challenged them to return to Colorado to help investigators solve the case. In a rare public statement, the Ramseys replied sharply to the governor, saying that he was wrong, that they had been entirely cooperative with the authorities.

In their book, they accused the governor of making those remarks for his own political purposes.

Today, Mr. Owens took note of the Ramseys' return to public view and said in an interview: ''What we've got here is an orchestrated campaign to establish themselves as the true victims of the crime, rather than JonBenet. For years when it mattered, they wouldn't talk. Now, you can't quiet them down.''

''And without a doubt,'' he added, ''they are deflecting attention from themselves, pointing a finger to some killer they say laid in wait.''

Neal Gabler, a cultural historian and author of the 1998 book ''Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,'' said that to the Ramseys, public perceptions of their guilt or innocence might be less important than achieving celebrity and sympathy through a burst of publicity. By extension, a favorable public rating could benefit them if the authorities ever charged them.

''What the Ramseys are doing here is creating and scripting their own little film with all the ancillary rights,'' Mr. Gabler said. ''They have become stars in their own movie, written in the medium of life, and as stars do in conventional films, they are exploiting it.''

Referring to family videotapes that the Ramseys released after JonBenet's death, showing her as a bouncy cowgirl, singing and dancing, Mr. Gabler added: ''They exploited their daughter before she died. So it all continues. They want attention.''

From a prosecution perspective, little that the Ramseys said in the television interviews or the book, people familiar with their contents say, sheds any light on the killing. Rather, the Ramseys conveyed details of their lives since JonBenet's body was found and the range of emotions they felt as a consequence of losing a daughter so young.